Bodily assaults focusing on Bitcoin and crypto holders are rising at an alarming price, in keeping with new information tracked by CASA co-founder Jameson Lopp.
Key Takeaways:
- Crypto-related bodily assaults have surged 169% since February, with 48 incidents reported in 2025 to date.
- Victims embody on a regular basis holders and executives, as rising Bitcoin costs make them high-value targets.
- Safety specialists warn that whereas threats are rising, self-custody instruments and greatest practices have additionally considerably improved.
Since late February, 35 new violent incidents have been reported globally, a 169% enhance in simply six and a half months, in keeping with a report by Forbes.
The uptick provides to an already troubling development, as cryptocurrency markets proceed their bullish run.
Crypto-Associated Assaults in 2025 Already Up 33% from Final Yr
In whole, 48 assaults have occurred to date in 2025, marking a 33% enhance over all of 2024. France alone has accounted for 14 of this 12 months’s reported incidents.
Victims vary from retail holders and merchants to crypto executives, highlighting the broad scope of the risk.
One of the crucial disturbing circumstances passed off on September 6 in Cambridge, Canada, the place a younger man was kidnapped at gunpoint and compelled to switch funds right into a cryptocurrency pockets.
“He was compelled to deposit a big amount of cash right into a cryptocurrency account,” mentioned Waterloo Regional Police officer Chris Iden.
Whereas the sufferer sustained non-life-threatening accidents, the suspects, described as 4 Black males in a dark-colored van, stay unidentified.
Talking in a current interview, Lopp emphasised that safety is a shifting goal for digital asset holders. “The safety panorama is continually altering,” he mentioned.
“It’s simply a facet of the ecosystem that any prudent investor ought to keep on high of, since this asset class is very unforgiving of errors.”
Lopp believes Bitcoin’s rising worth is a double-edged sword. “It’s extra useful, therefore there are extra felons pursuing to take it away from you,” he mentioned.
However enhancements in self-custody instruments and greatest practices have additionally superior considerably. “We have now enormously improved our safety greatest practices through the years to counteract the savvier attackers,” he added.
He famous that ETFs could be a safer different for many who merely need worth publicity.
“You commerce off issues like social engineering threat and poor key administration threat for the danger that the custodian could fall sufferer to such assaults or losses,” Lopp defined.
Keep Protected: Keep away from Flaunting Crypto Holdings, Report Advises
To assist customers keep protected, the writer of the report provided some easy recommendation: Don’t be ‘the Bitcoin man’ in your group.
Keep away from publicizing holdings, particularly on social media. Self-custody customers ought to make investments time in understanding safety fundamentals like seed phrase safety, passphrases, and utilizing multisig wallets with geographically separated signing units.
Different ideas embody avoiding overly complicated storage techniques which may turn out to be inaccessible even to the proprietor and contemplating a steadiness between self-custody and delegated custody relying on particular person threat profiles.
France has turn out to be a hotspot for these crimes, with 14 out of fifty world wrench assaults recorded there over the previous 12 months.
Moroccan police in June arrested a suspect accused of kidnapping crypto executives.
In France, the daddy of a crypto millionaire was brutally attacked. And in New York, a vacationer was tortured for over two weeks as kidnappers tried to extract his Bitcoin credentials.
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